Posts by Paul Basken
October 8, 2009, 05:00 PM ET
Big Splash in Bug-Splatter Research
This week just may have brought the biggest development in the science of bug splatter in more than a decade.
A long 12 years after Mark E. Hostetler of the University of
Florida won the Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for his analysis of
insects smushed by car windshields, a nationwide team of
researchers has brought the field buzzing back with the help of
advanced genomics.
The group, led by Anton Nekrutenko of Pennsylvania State
University, has developed a method of taking the scrapings off the
front of a car and chemically identifying and counting the
individual species of bugs stuck in the muck.
“This is extremely difficult,” Mr. Nekrutenko said, explaining his
breakthrough as an important new use of metagenomics, which is the
science of genetically analyzing a microorganism through the
extraction and cloning of its DNA.
Mr. Hostetler can appreciate the advance. An associate professor
...
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